How to find someone’s name on twitter

One way to build followers on twitter is to list their twitter names in your tweets. But what if you don’t know their names on twitter?

To find out someone’s twitter name, use this formula in a search engine: name name site:twitter.com. Or you could use a phrase search for their two names adjacent to each other by putting them in quotes: “name name” site:twitter.com.

This is known as a keyword search, filtered to specific website. I find more people this way than using twitter’s own search. For example if you didn’t know I was @bcfought on twitter, but knew my name, put in a search engine:

Barbara Fought site:twitter.com

and this is what you’ll get:

It works even for my friend Kim Brown, whose name is very common and who doesn’t use her full name in her twitter handle: @KimInCuse (as in Kim-in-Syracuse). She came up second, maybe because she’s a prolific tweeter:

In the field you may not have time, but when you can, try it out. It is a way to keep the interaction with readers, viewers, listeners, and it can build your follower list.